All over the world, boys hold marriages together, and girls break them up. An American with one daughter is nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than an American with one son. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: the parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorceRead more at location 1761

So in this case correlation really does imply causation—unless I’m wrong about gender being random. But why would it not be? Why should unhappily married people have a disproportionate number of girls? Well, maybe some third factor simultaneously affects the happiness of your marriage and the gender of your children.Read more at location 1775

people listed in Who’s Who have, collectively, about 15 percent more sons than daughters. (For the latter statistic, I rely on the testimony of the biologist Robin Baker in his book Sperm Wars.)Read more at location 1779

So if you want a lot of grandchildren (and whether you want them or not, your genes do), you’ll want sons if you’re near the top of the status heap, but daughters if you’re near the bottom.Read more at location 1785

Now: what’s the mechanism to accomplish all this? One suggestion from the biologists—and one that makes good sense to an economist—is that a pregnant woman’s body, in deciding how much to invest in nourishing the embryo, takes account of the parents’ status and the embryo’s sex. High-status mothers give more nourishment to male embryos; low-status mothers give more nourishment to female embryos; better-nourished embryos are more likely to be born alive.Read more at location 1787

Can the involuntary process of nourishing an embryo respond to conscious information about status? Sure; this kind of thing happens all the time. Sweating with fear is an involuntary process, and it’s easily triggered by conscious awareness of an approaching tiger.Read more at location 1790

In East Germany, during the traumatic years after the fall of Communism and the difficult transition to a market economy, unemployment reached historic highs, and so did the ratio of female births.Read more at location 1797

Children of divorce usually stay with the mother, so the question comes down to this: why do fathers stick around for sons when they won’t stick around for daughters? (Or, alternatively, why do mothers stay married so their sons can have a father when they won’t do the same for their daughters?)Read more at location 1816

Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child. Suppose they have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child’s sex. It turns out that those couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy.Read more at location 1828

Although they don’t mention it, there’s one more bit of evidence to support the Dahl-Moretti “parents prefer boys” hypothesis: adoption agencies almost uniformly report a higher demand for girls.Read more at location 1835

Todd Peters: boys with low self-esteem become withdrawn and unattractive; girls with low self-esteem become promiscuous. So, if you want lots of grandchildren, you’ve got to raise the self-esteem of your sons (by staying married) and lower the self-esteem of your daughters (by getting divorced).Read more at location 1846

parents could well believe that boys, more than girls, need big inheritances—either because wealth gives boys a bigger advantage in the mating competition, or because boys are more likely to do something entrepreneurial.Read more at location 1848